Cinematical Seven: Movies That Start Fights

I've been meaning to purchase and wear this t-shirt since I learned of its existence a couple of months ago, but I figured I'd better let the Twilight: New Moon hysteria die down first. It would appear, after all, that openly declaring one's hostility toward the Twilight franchise on one's person, even with a statement as unquestionably correct as "Vampires Don't Sparkle," is just asking for trouble. You do not want to mess with a gaggle of rabid Robert Pattinson fans.

I do not hate the Twilight franchise, actually, though I would like to suggest that the Twilighteers may live to regret sinking so much time and emotion into something so utterly banal. But I seem to be one of the few who occupy the middle ground. Twilight might be the most divisive love-it-or-hate-it phenomenon of the last few years. Not everyone adores Harry Potter, but most people have at least a grudging respect for it; Twilight has as many haters as fawning admirers.

You gotta admit that if you can use a movie to start an argument, it's at least good for something. Here are seven other movies that seem to disproportionately divide the moviegoing population into adoring fans and angry detractors.

1. Titanic - To get the obvious out of the way. It's amazing to me how often people make offhand derisive mentions of Titanic, as if its awfulness were well-established and self-evident. As with Twilight, of course, the surprisingly widespread disdain of this movie is a backlash against its army of obsessive partisans (and from a similar demographic to boot) -- the folks who showed up on local news shows in 1997 bragging about having seen it 16 times in the theater, etc. The fact that Titanic is a fantastic film -- and not really (or at least not only) for the reasons many of its fans think -- tends to get lost in the shuffle, sadly.